Making Pictures

June 13, 2001

By
Dennis E. Powell

The moral of the story has, really,
only been hinted at so far, but it's important. I often write of the
"Linux community," and in some ways that's a useful term,
but it glosses over what is really a whole group of nice, little
manageable communities. The "Linux community" is made up of
millions of people, and there's not much you can do with or about it.
But those little communities are one of Linux's greatest strengths.

What do I mean? Well, when I wanted a
quick take on the best and easiest software for burning my CDs, I
posted a question to the Caldera list. I've been on that list, off
and on, for years. While most of the people there use Caldera's
distribution or variations thereon, that's not a requirement for
membership. Nor is discussion limited to things Caldera, or to things
Linux, or, really, to anything. Over the years threads have gone all
over hell's half acre. The lone consistent quality is the sense of
community, of people who have never met but who are friends anyway.
Oh, yeah, there can be, are, and have been some pretty fierce flame
wars, but mostly it's a bunch of people sitting around talking. The
list spawned a highly successful step-by-step effort, which has
documented a lot of Linux stuff in pure recipe form, in an effort to
defang the "I dunno; I just did some stuff and then it worked"
approach to configuration and to strip the excess out of the often
outdated how-tos. I knew that if I asked there, I'd get good
information, quickly.

Each little community has its own
flavor. The KDE developers list has its own group of personalities.
The KDE user list likewise. Both are fine lists, but had I asked
there, I would have been pointed to the KDE application for burning
CDs. I like KDE, but my quest was for an application that would do
the job, not a KDE application that would do the job. (There is a KDE
app, KreateCD, that is very promising; I built it and abandoned it
because it wanted to use a goofy, almost unreadable typeface,
probably because I have font anti-aliasing enabled.) But those lists
are both very helpful, and, though to a lesser extent than the
Caldera list and some others, people there can get to know each
other. This is important: You have a configuration problem and the
solution is a little bit complicated. On a big, nameless list or
newsgroup it's easy for the person who knows the answer, and who
maybe has posted it a time or two before, to go on to the next
message. But if that person has gotten to know you, has maybe shared
a joke or two, he or she is far more likely to take the time to write
it all out.

Linux, maybe more than the mainstream
operating system, tends toward community. Some of it no doubt comes
from a shared sense of being under siege, though the community was
there before Microsoft launched its silly little assault. There is,
too, the fact that by definition Linux users have chosen to be out of
the mainstream. Mostly, I think, it's because in what one would think
would be a totally technical sphere, we want to make it clear that
though we're talking about machines, we're not machines ourselves.
(For much the same reason, developers I know really appreciate it
when they get thank-you notes from happy users.)

Each little community has its own
tone, its own flavor. The Caldera list is, like the distribution that
spawned it, pretty mellow. The last time I was on the Red Hat list,
it tended to be a little more contentious, which is consistent with
the distribution's sometimes-too-bleeding-edge character. I've not
been on the Debian list, but from what I've seen of messages there it
seems to tend toward the legalistic and is more technically oriented
than some of the others. This is not to criticize any of them but
instead to suggest that there's a place for everybody among Linux's
multitude of communities. It's surprising, sometimes, the extent to
which they will go to solve a problem, to share happiness or grief,
to behave like non-virtual communities ought to behave but seldom do.

Every so often I encounter someone who
is using Linux but who hasn't taken part in any of these mailing
lists, these groups of people who began with a common interest but
ended up friends. They're missing a lot and they're denying other
users a lot -- almost everybody has hit upon the solution to a
problem that isn't common but that someone else will run into. Making
that solution public is a useful exercise, and the way that users who
don't write code can give back to the system. And because of the
large amount of cross pollination -- people who are members of
multiple "communities" -- the word gets spread.

So, if you're new to Linux, or if
you've been using it awhile but haven't found out that it's more than
just an operating system and applications, consider this to be both
advice and an invitation: Look around at the various mailing lists,
then join as many as your mail-reading time can handle (I still have
4,000 messages to go through that stacked up while I was in Florida),
and participate in the community. You, and it, will be richer for it.